Hackers hit Sourceforge

Open sauce becoming a target

It appears that rather than wipe the smug smile off Apple fanboy faces by taking down Jobs' Mob, hackers are wading into Open Sauce.

We have reported how the Fedora site got a good kicking from hackers and now it seems that Source Forge, which is the Open Saucer's code bank has been attacked.

According to the site, it detected a direct targeted attack that resulted in an exploit of several SourceForge.net servers.

Open saucers shut down a handful of developer centric services to safeguard data and protect the majority of the SourceForge services.

The guardians of the Open Sauce said that they were trying prevent further exposure and ensure data integrity.

It has called in all its staff to identifying how the hacker got in and restoring the impacted services.

It seems that the problem was initially discovered on the servers that host CVS but several other machines were roped in.

A spokes saucer said that the outfit had determined the extent of the attack, and was verifying all of our other services and data.

In the short term, the outfit has taken down CVS Hosting, ViewVC (web based code browsing), New Release upload capability, and Interactive Shell services

Source Forge said that once the dust has settled it will provide more information.

It is not clear who or why anyone would attack the Open Sauce movement, but there appears to be a stepping up of attacks lately. Instead of the usual let's embarrass Microsoft plan of attack, hitting SourceForge is like walloping the good guys.

These guys would have more impact and fame if they attacked Apple which is smugly claiming that it is invulnerable to hacking because of its genius security. Attacking open sauce proves that everyone is open to security threats.

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I wouldn't be surprized if this attack is found to be coming from somewhere around Redmond... Open Source were never the threat it is now with the enormous popularity of smartphones and tablets. Someone is trying to show how insecure Open Source is. And more worryingly, they succeeded!

David Webber - 28 Jan 20:54

These attacks are sophisticated and business driven.

The aim is to squat unseen and harvest user account information and to hijack downloads to spread Trojan software to other systems and then compromise and harvest those.

The level of sophistication needed to do this points to organized activity that is well beyond just a mere hacking. These people had purpose and planning.

WSmart - 28 Jan 22:15

The thing with open source/Linux is that it's not a house of cards that you're afraid to touch, the installs. If my install was completely wiped, I'd just install it again, a thought that probably would make 99.9% of users outside of Linux tremble.

I got a feeling this is coming from volesoft.com. Every since Mic' got that scooter he's been behaving very oddly. And where did he get the cash for that thing?

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